Mistrunner 4 - Chapter 50 - Unlimited (Patreon)

Theoretically, there is no limit to what a powerful mystic can do. Despite studying it for centuries, we still don’t know everything about how Mist interacts with people. We can see the mechanics of that interaction easily enough, but there are so many things we can’t explain. In a way, that’s reassuring, but it’s also terrifying.

Galatira Iamaxis

Pain unlike anything I’d ever felt before tore through my body. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t feel anything other than agony. And for a brief moment, I knew I was going to die. Then, some part of me simply refused to let that happen. I don’t know if it was my core, my mind, or something more ephemeral, but in that moment – a split second before my body succumbed to whatever force had begun to rip it to pieces – something inside of me looked death in the eye and spat in its face.

It spat back.

More, it enveloped me in a way nothing else ever had, and it redoubled its efforts. It was almost as if death saw my refusal to succumb as an insult to the very building blocks of reality, and it wanted to punish me for that affront. And the means of that penance was pain. Lots and lots of pain, and to a degree that left the vast majority of my mind blank.

But there was one thread that focused on what was actually happening – or rather, on how to combat it. Something had torn me apart. Likely an explosion, based on how violently it had happened. All around me, there was Mist-laced fire, and bits and pieces of my body had flown in every direction.

That explained the pain I was trying to ignore even as it gripped nearly ever thought in my [Multi-Mind]. I ran from it, putting mental walls all around me as I tried to endure. As I tried to fix what was happening. In doing so, I focused almost entirely on the Mist all around me, on dragging as much to my core as I could.

And without my body to constrain it, I found that the connection I felt to the ambient ethera was incredibly strong. Infinitely so. It felt like I was staring into a vast abyss, and all I needed to do was simply take the leap and fall into infinity.

That’s what the whispers begged of me, at least. They were so clear. So powerful. Since I’d absorbed my Nexus Implant, barely a day had gone by that I hadn’t heard those tantalizing whispers. Now, though, they had become screams. Not of terror or torment, though. Instead, they were pleading. Begging. They wanted me to join them.

And every facet of my being desperately wanted to give them what they wanted.

I couldn’t though. Not with Earth’s fate hanging over me. I needed to save everyone. So, as enticing as those whispers were, I pulled away from the edge of that proverbial cliff and focused on survival. With control I’d never acknowledged, I latched onto the Mist all around me, and I flooded the cluster of nanites that governed the ability associated with my [Mist-Infused Body], forcing it to rebuild the damage that had been done.

And for the first time ever, it was found wanting.

There wasn’t enough left to reform. My body had been so thoroughly destroyed that I couldn’t simply build on whatever remnant remained. And that ability – as powerful as it was – was entirely incapable of doing what was necessary. So, I discarded it. If it couldn’t do what was necessary, then I’d have to do it myself.

But I did keep one thing.

The template. Buried somewhere in that ability was a map of my body, a snap shot of the physical manifestation of who I was. And though the ability itself was incapable of putting me back together, that template gave me the guidance to do what my limited ability could not.

Still, I didn’t really know what I was doing. Instead, I simply dragged more Mist into my core, shoving it toward that map with only the simplest of instructions: rebuild me. As simple as that command was, the desire behind it was so powerful that the nanites couldn’t refuse. And so, they responded to the desperate plea in my mind, and slowly, layer by layer, recreated my body.

For some parts, it grabbed the material all around me. The meat and bones and everything else that had once been me. Where that failed, it used metal and plastic and whatever else was available, converting them on the fly. The results weren’t entirely organic. Nor were they completely artificial. Instead, it was somehow both, but neither.

I didn’t have any choice, though.

Nor could I truly appreciate what was happening. Pain still raged within and without, and in the single thread of thought I’d kept quarantined from the agony, I knew my time was limited. Even as I built a husk of a body, it was just that – a lifeless shell. I needed to connect it. To suffuse it with my essence. Otherwise, the moment I ran out of Mist – and that was coming sooner than I wanted to acknowledge – whatever constituted me would dissipate into the atmosphere, and the body I’d built would fall, dead and lifeless.

For a while – which was subjective – I despaired, uncertain how I was meant to solve the problem. Yet, a spark of instinct or inspiration showed me the way, and I forced a branch of Mist from my core, sending it down my new leg. When I did, I felt something. It was barely more than a tremor of life, but it was enough to confirm that I was on the right track. A single branch wasn’t enough, though. I needed more. I needed to suffuse the body with my personal Mist until my body’s every last cell was touched by at least one nanite.

So, that’s what I endeavored to do. It started out by sending tiny tendrils of mist from that main branch, but soon enough, it became something else. Something on a far smaller scale. I don’t know how long it took. As I sank into that task, an eternity might have passed. But slowly – ever so slowly – I accomplished my goal, infusing my body with power and life and whatever else constituted my identity.

Suddenly, I let out a gasp as my eyes opened.

And all I saw was blue-tinged fire. All I felt was some indefinable force tugging at me, trying to rip me to pieces. A roar of an explosion told me that only a fraction of a second had passed since everything had gone white, but I felt like a thousand years – or more – had passed. I was a different person, body, mind, and if such a thing existed, soul.

I raised my hand, and with a flex of Mist, the world went quiet. The roiling flames ceased to move, and the shockwave that had already torn my body to pieces simply ended. Then, the pieces of the ship fell to the ground, having been robbed of all momentum. The fires winked out, and only silence reigned.

That’s when Secure Connection reestablished itself.

“Mira! Mira!” shouted Patrick.

“I’m fine,” I responded, the echoes of that indescribable pain still coursing through me. Even those remnants made a mockery of my Pain Tolerance, though with every passing moment, it became easier to keep the torment quarantined. I was more concerned with the fact that, suddenly, I saw everything so much more clearly.

And the Mist was everywhere.

In the air. In the bits and pieces of the ship that had just exploded. In the bodies of the people I’d killed. And it was all alive, swirling around with what felt like obvious intent. It wasn’t, though. The nanites weren’t alive. They were just…something else that I didn’t quite understand. That I couldn’t. Not until I joined them.

But I knew that walking down that road – or plunging over the edge of that cliff – would require the cessation of whatever made me who, or rather what, I was. If I did that, I would join the whispers that had once again faded into the background. They were louder than they had been before the explosion, but not nearly so insistent as they had been when I’d been without a body.

“How?” he muttered. “You’re strong, but…”

“Not now,” I said, stepping past the still smoking rubble. The fires had faded, but the heat remained. However, it didn’t touch me – not in any way that mattered. “What happened? Where did that come from?”

“The upper atmosphere,” Patrick said. “The shockwave knocked the Leviathan almost ten miles away…”

That’s when I really got a view of my surroundings. There wasn’t much left of the buildings that had once characterized the area. Instead, they’d been reduced to rubble. A couple had made a show of persistence, but only skeletons of what they’d once been remained. A few metal frames, but even those looked like they were only a stiff breeze away from joining the rest of the area.

Otherwise, I found myself in the middle of a massive crater that reminded me of the one inhabited by the irradiated wildlings.

“It was like a beam of pure, white light. I thought…Mira, are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. “The ship isn’t up to flight right now, but –”

“I said I’m fine,” I reiterated, though I didn’t know how true that was. Barely anything of who I was remained. Even the Hand of God had been destroyed. So too had my arsenal implant. My sheath. And my clothes. There was nothing left by whatever I’d used to cobble together a body.

I looked down at my naked form, and I saw nothing out of the ordinary – not at first. But then I realized what was missing. There wasn’t a single scar on my body. The moment I recognized that, a wave of nausea swept through me. I fell to my knees and vomited. But even that was performative. I didn’t need to vomit. The feeling was driven entirely by the memory of how my body should have reacted.

Because what I was had transcended anything so mundane as nausea.

In fact, I already felt disconnected from my humanity, and in a way I couldn’t adequately explain. Nor could I fully wrap my mind around what it meant. Was I no better than those androids I’d so disdainfully dismissed as artificial? No. I was still a human being. It was no different than if I’d had a few cybernetics installed.

But I knew that was untrue.

Even the most extensive cybernetics kept the brain intact. Mine wasn’t like that, though. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I needed a brain anymore. Or anything else. During that explosion, I’d been nothing but a cloud of Mist, and yet, I’d still been capable of thought. Of pain. Of enacting a plan to meet my goal of survival.

I had no idea what any of it meant.

But I couldn’t stop asking myself what seemed a very pertinent question: was I immortal, now? No. I distinctly felt that much, at least. If I’d taken too long, I would have dissipated into the Mist.

Probably.

Everything was a little muddled, at least in terms of what had happened during that brief instant.

Whatever the case, I had survived, albeit in an unconventional way, so any questions as to what precisely had happened could wait for later. In the meantime, I needed to escape ground zero and regroup back at the camp. Once there, we could figure out how to proceed.

So, without further ado, I set off across the crater. It was actually much larger than anything my first impressions suggested, and it took me almost an hour of walking to reach the edge. When I did, I was confronted with a steep slope that extended nearly three hundred feet above me. That’s when I remembered that I could fly.

“Stupid,” I muttered to myself as I gathered the Mist around me and leaped into the air. To my surprise, the process of flight came far easier than ever before. I only had to think it, and the Mist responded to my every whim. And when I really pushed, I could move incredibly fast. Like – top speed of my Cutter level of fast.

It was a that point that I realized how much I’d lost. My arsenal implant was gone, and so was the hoverbike my uncle had posthumously gifted me. My weapons, too. The only thing I had left was my body.

And the Mist that seemed desperate to respond to my every command.

For a moment, I considered going back to the center of the crater to see if I could recover anything, but I knew how useless that would have been. Without the anchoring cybernetic, the arsenal implant would have become untethered and disappeared into whatever quantum space where it existed. The same was true of the Cutter.

No – my equipment, some of which had been with me since the very beginning – was gone. And that realization came with a sudden loneliness I couldn’t explain. I had never been the sort of girl who became attached to her weapons. The only reason I’d named my pistol was because Gala had insisted. But I’d have been lying if I claimed that I didn’t keenly feel the loss.

Hoving in mid-air, naked as the day I was born, I sighed.

My world had just irrevocably changed, and I wasn’t certain how to deal with that new reality. I hung there for a long moment, then I spun around to behold the aftermath of the explosion I had somehow managed to survive.

What I had done was not normal. I knew that. Even in the wider universe or among mystics, it couldn’t have been common. Perhaps it was even entirely unheard-of. For all I knew, what I had done was completely unique.

And that was terrifying.

But walking a new path always was. I’d felt similarly adrift after losing Jeremiah, and again when I’d thought Patrick was gone. I had persevered, though, and even if I’d done some terrible things in the aftermath of both of those incidents, I had survived, and I had grown stronger.  I intended to do so again.

So, after I collected my thoughts, I pushed against the Mist and took off. It took me a moment to recognize that I’d done so without thought for which direction I was going. However, after only a moment, I realized that I was following the tendril of Mist that constituted Secure Connection. Before, I’d had to concentrate to see it, but now, it was plain as day. If I hadn’t recognized that I had changed, that would have driven it home.

I didn’t travel at my top speed. Instead, I barely exerted myself as I flew away from the blast zone. Eventually, I left the island behind, crossing a short span of water before flying over the rest of the ancient and abandoned city. While the crater had been contained to an area only a couple of miles across, the effects of the explosion were evident even ten miles away from the epicenter. Buildings had been destroyed, and the wildlings who’d been just outside the area had begun a stampede in an effort to escape the explosion they were ill-equipped to understand.

Each one glowed with so much potential that, all gathered together, they were nearly blinding to my Mist senses. It was just further evidence of how they differed from the people who’d received Nexus Implants, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the world wouldn’t have been better off if we’d never had those foisted upon us. Sure, they helped us adjust, but they also clearly hindered people in a way that, in retrospect, felt entirely unnatural.

Would Earth have been better off without the system or its Nexus Implants? Maybe not immediately. But as the wildlings evolved, they would certainly be much stronger than if they’d been fitted with those implants. That line of thought made me wonder if those Nexus Implants were just another means of control. Sure, everyone had told me they were there to help people adapt to the Mist, and that made sense.

Except nothing in the universe was meant to help people. Indeed, everything I had seen since, well, forever, suggested the opposite. So, what was more believable? That some altruistic group of aliens had instituted a system whereby people would be saved? Or that they’d done so in the hopes of containing any threat of new races outstripping their power?

I knew the answer to that question.

But just because it was more likely didn’t mean that it was true.

So, with those thoughts dancing in my mind, I flew across the landscape, outpacing the fleeing wildlings until I eventually found where Patrick had landed. Or crashed, really, given the state of the Leviathan. It was tilted on its side, with only part of its landing gear having extended, and there were great dents in the fuselage, suggesting that he’d guided it to a rough landing.

I hit the ground at a light jog, then entered the open cargo bay. It didn’t take me long to find Patrick in the engine room, where he was busy working on the propulsion system. I could see the Mist leaking from the fuel box, which couldn’t have been good.

“What did you do to my ship?” I demanded, trying to keep my tone good-natured.

Patrick turned, and his jaw dropped. “Where are your clothes?”

“Shit.”

I knew I’d forgotten something, but I wasn’t going to let my embarrassment show. So, I put my hands on my hips and said, “Don’t try to change the subject. Why did you crash my ship?”

“It’s my ship, too!”

“And you crashed it.”

“I saved it! Do you have any idea how big that blast was?”

“Kind of. I was only at the center of it,” I said dismissively. That’s when his face fell, and without another word, he stood up, crossed the room, and threw his arms around me.

“I thought I lost you,” he muttered.

“You almost did,” I said. “But…things have kind of changed.”

Then, I told him as much as I could about what had happened. It wasn’t a short explanation, and in the end, it didn’t really reveal much.

“I think we need to ask an expert about this,” he stated.

“We only know one expert, and he’s an asshole.”

“Freddy is the best we have.”

“But –”

“Mira, you can’t figure this out on your own. You know that. So, swallow your pride or your anger or whatever it is that you’re feeling, and let’s go have a talk with him,” he said, gesturing with a wrench. “You know I’m right.”

“Fine. But I still think he’s an asshole,” I muttered. Then, I turned and marched back to our quarters where I hoped to find some clothes.